INDIA SUMMARIZED

Sonia Gandhi started out smartly -- paying homage to Ramakrishna Paramahansa, the guru of Swami Vivekananda, on whose 150th birth anniversary chariot Chief Minister Narendra Modi hopes to ride to Prime Ministership in 2014. But that was it. Her speech, kicking off the Congress campaign, lacked the zing that Modi gives to waiting crowds, even if it is about a retracted RTI application on Sonia's alleged spending on foreign travel. The most dramatic bit in her 15-minute speech was, "They are not against corruption, they are only against us". You could almost hear the crowd missing the 'maut ka saudagar' sting of 2007, and watch the prompts to clap.. Sonia Gandhi's 'bordering-on-economics' speech clarifying that states were free to reject the UPA's FDI policy which would get rid of "middlemen to benefit farmers" and that UPA gave more funds to develop Gujarat than the NDA, and that crude oil which sold $ 32 a barrel in NDA's time,...